Inspiration
When somebody knocks at the door to our apartment in North Ave, we often don't hear them because we are either in our rooms, talking loudly, or listening to music. We obviously can't put a doorbell outside our room due to wiring issues. In order to solve our problem, we need to enhance the functionality of our door by enabling it to detect knocks and notify us digitally.
What it does
Using a Particle Photon board, our device sits on our door and actively listens for knocks with its sound sensor. When a knock is detected, the device plays a customizable doorbell tone and pushes a Discord notification to our computers.
How I built it
We constructed the device using a breadboard, jumper cables, a sound detection module, a piezo buzzer, and a Particle Photon.
Challenges I ran into
When building, we ran into issues with the sound sensor not correctly registering sounds. Additionally, coding the buzzer to play the chime correctly took some trial and error. Finally, we had to adjust sampling frequency of the sound sensor to make sure the device did not interpret a single knock as multiple.
Accomplishments that I'm proud of
This was our first-time using Particle boards and by extension the Particle IDE in a project. However, we believe this was an excellent introduction to this new hardware. We all enjoyed programming the device from the bottom up and integrating into the web services.
What I learned
We learned how to program Particle boards, use sound detection modules, and integrate our device into the Internet of Things. We also learned how to do some fundamental signal processing and filtering to increase the accuracy of our knock detection.
What's next for Door Knock: Discord Expansion
In the future, we believe it would be fun to add a Twitter webhook to the device so we can run a Twitter bot which notifies anyone who is curious how often people knock on our doors. For a rather lofty goal, we eventually would like the device to differentiate between our individual knocks so it can actually identify who exactly is at our door. Later, we could potentially even add a camera to photograph unknown guests standing outside.
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